Apple takes a jab at AT&T for calling all their phones 4G when they’re really not

Due to time zone issues I opted to skip following the live blogs that were meticulously documenting every single announcement Apple made yesterday and instead decided to start today, less than 12 hours after the big unveiling of the iPhone 4S, watching the keynote over breakfast. It’s a little over 97 minutes long, so if you’ve got the time to kill I highly recommend you give it a go, not because you’ll hear about something you haven’t already read, but because you’ll get to see demos of the newly announced features, and more importantly see what Tim Cook, Apple’s new CEO, is like on stage. One part of the keynote that put a tremendous smile on face, which is rather difficult to do since as much as I like Apple I try my best to distance myself from raging fanbois, was Phil Schiller showing the graph above of the maximum theoretical download rate of the new iPhone 4S compared to several Android smartphones offered by AT&T, in particular the Motorola Atrix 4G, LG Thrill 4G, and HTC Inspire 4G. After mocking their names, pointing out that they’re all called 4G, he says:

“We’re not going to get into a debate in the industry of what’s 4G and what isn’t, we’ll leave that to others to talk about. What’s most important, when it comes to real world performance, the iPhone 4S is just as fast as all these phones.”

For those of us who threw a fit when Sprint decided to call their WiMAX network 4G, despite it failing to get download speeds higher than 10 megabits per second in the real world, and then shortly thereafter T-Mobile made the situation even worse by having the nerve to call their 21 Mbps HSPA+ network 4G, despite it not being able to deliver more than 6 megabits per second in most larger cities, seeing Phil shit on AT&T for saying that 14.4 megabits per second is 4G is absolutely priceless.

Finally, someone picking up that horrendous part. Even the fact of calling it “S”, is funny at best

Jim Snowden

Ok, whether or not something is “4G” is beside the point. The speed is what is important. The fact is AT&T will be the only network that has the ability to download faster. So what this graph really shows is that if you get the device on the AT&T network, it will perform faster than on Sprint or Verizon. And that IS the point.

Anonymous

not really. Speed test apps are notorious for short term data acceleration bursts. I tested a verizon iphone 4s with my friend’s iphone 4s on ATT. Speed tests showed my 3G speeds to be around 1 Mbps. while his was ? 3-4 Mbps… but EVERY SINGLE TIME.. youtube videos on my Verizon iphone opened faster than his on AT&T. Go figure!